


Rise Up and Come Away

by songlin



Series: Powerful, Beautiful and Without Regret [8]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Blood, Blood Drinking, Clothed Sex, M/M, Post Reichenbach, Reunions, Vampire Sherlock, Vampires, Werewolf John, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-02
Updated: 2012-07-02
Packaged: 2017-11-09 01:48:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/449909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/songlin/pseuds/songlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I will not lose you again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Dawn Will Break the Silence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John returns to his home and clinic work and the dull roar of normality.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Theme: The Wedding of River Song by Murray Gold

John lives on.

A spot opens up in a lycanthrope home in London. John suspects Mycroft, but takes the spot. He can’t bear to move in with another sanguinarian, to begin the process of replacing Sherlock. He’s fairly sure he never will.

Sometimes he toys with the idea of running away, fleeing to the country and living alone illegally. His sense always wins out in the end.

He gets terrible about taking his medications. He wakes up from more than one full moon locked in his room, shaking, because he’s forgotten a dose and gone wild. It makes him think of traumatized children throwing tantrums in their foster homes. He continues anyways.

They make all the residents see a therapist at least once a week, but they can’t force him to talk to her. After two weeks of stony silence, she stops trying. John brings books to his appointments. It’s a quiet place to read, and his therapist gets a chance to catch up on paperwork.

Lestrade comes by occasionally. Sometimes he and John go out for drinks, but not often. John’s got no desire to start thinking of bars as a place to be sad.

He visits Sherlock’s grave once a month like clockwork, and never leaves flowers.

Mycroft doesn’t either, though John knows he visits at least as often. He’s run into him a few times, standing over the grave and looking down as if he’s expecting Sherlock to rise, zombie-like, out of the ground.

They acknowledge each other with a small nod, nothing more, and then John returns to his home and clinic work and the dull roar of normality.

\---

Mycroft visits every Sunday at precisely midnight.

He’s not sure why. The moment Sherlock so much as twitches, Mycroft will get an automated call. There’s equipment wired onto him that could last a hundred years if necessary. Perhaps it’s his fondness for ritual and schedule.

It’s not. It’s sentiment, pure and simple.

It’s thanks to just that sentiment that Mycroft happens to be standing over Sherlock’s grave at 12:06AM one Sunday on a full moon, nearly three years after they’d buried him, when his mobile starts screaming alarms. He sighs with relief and crouches by the stone to wait.

Sherlock comes up within minutes--a favorable sign. Mycroft watches him dispassionately as he pulls himself out of the ground and flops, gasping, onto his back.

“Welcome back, Sherlock.”

Sherlock turns his head to spit out a clump of dirt. _“How long?”_


	2. Your Soul You Must Keep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John can’t possibly parse through what he’s thinking anymore. His head is moving too quickly. _Is this what it’s like for him?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Theme: Awake My Soul by Mumford and Sons

John took his medicine this month.

Full moons are hatefully dull these days. In the residence, he’s surrounded by lapdogs. _Tame_ wolves. John prides himself on being good, but he knows he’s never been tame.

He hides from the others as much as he can. They’re all reluctant hounds, wannabe humans, and half of them sleep the moons away. John tried it once. For the rest of the month he felt like his skin was caging him in until he transformed the next full moon and got a chance to run, and it was the best it had been in a long time.

No, John is not tame.

He prowls the halls, empty except for the orderlies. It’s not exactly what he’d ask for--it’s quiet, and the halls smell of industrial-strength carpet cleaner and dust and strong medications, but at least he’s moving.

He wishes he’d skipped his dose. At least he’d get a good run in then.

Once, he had someone to run with, who found him and fought him, sang his blood into boiling and drank it from his flesh.

_And I’ll never be rid of him,_ John thinks bitterly, as he climbs onto his bed just before sunrise.

He skips his usual post-moon shower. Instead, he finds his pyjamas, pulls them on, and goes to sleep.

He sleeps a lot these days. When he’s asleep, the world can’t grind away at his nerves with the sheer _banality_ of it. When he’s asleep, he’s just as alive as he can stand.

\---

When John wakes again, it’s night again, and there’s a cold wind blowing in from his open window. He rolls out of bed, switches on the light and curses at himself for forgetting to shut it before he--

He freezes.

_There is a vampire in his room._

Senses up to eleven courtesy of the recent moon, John can smell it and feel it prickling over his skin. It’s been a long time since he was around a sanguinarian, and so it’s registering as a threat again.

Moving slowly, he shuts the window and turns his back.

_“John, NO!”_

Suddenly the smell is everywhere, and a dark blur slams into his side and tackles him to the floor as the window explodes inward. The intruder takes the brunt of the broken glass, but John’s not thinking logically yet, so his first instinct is to punch the man in the jaw hard enough to knock him back, get onto his feet, snatch up the gun in his bedside table and aim it at the man who’s straightening, brushing glass shards out of his hair, and--

_\--tall, slim, long coat, dark, curly hair, pale skin, cheekbones--_

John’s hands shake. “No. No...”

He stumbles back. His leg gives out under him, driving him down to his knees, but then he’s caught under the arms, pulled him up and set him down on the bed.

“John,” he says, and puts a cool hand to the side of his face. “I owe you a thousand apologies.”

John shuts his eyes. “Erm,” he says, swallowing. His mouth’s gone dry. When did his mouth go dry? “Could you--lights--”

“Of course.”

The cool hand disappears. A moment later, the darkness behind John’s eyelids deepens.

“The sniper--”

“Moran. I’m sure you remember--”

“I sure fucking do.”

“Mycroft’s people--I sent--they’re taking care of him, but I had to--”

John takes a deep breath and opens his eyes.

In the moonlit room, Sherlock looks twice as pale, his hair even darker. His eyes are brighter than John can ever remember them being, practically luminous.

“Oh my _God.”_ John’s still working to get his eyes and his mind in agreement. It’s a challenge. _Maybe if I just--_

He reaches out two fingers and just brushes the backs of them against Sherlock’s cheek. Solid. Present. _Alive_.

His lips curl up in a little smile. “No, I’m not a hallucination.”

John can’t possibly parse through what he’s thinking anymore. His head is moving too quickly. _Is this what it’s like for him?_ It’s a commotion inside, a riot of emotion, and he can’t decide whether to hit him again or walk out of the room or cry--

But if he’s to be honest, it was no contest.

He grabs Sherlock with both hands, one fisted in the front of his shirt and the other clutching at the back of his neck, pulls him down and kisses him.

It’s not like their first kiss, which was gentle and sweet and a little afraid, nor rough and full of teeth like their last. It’s less kissing and more like breathing in each others’ air, or mapping out the topology of mouths, and remembering what makes your lover gasp or shiver or moan. Sherlock clenches his hands around John’s upper arms like he’s the only thing anchoring him to the ground. It certainly feels like gravity’s gone upside down, so John clings harder to Sherlock and sighs.

“Hungry?” he asks, and tips his head back to bare his neck. “Because I sure fucking want you to be.”

Sherlock just _growls_. He’s gentle as he presses John down onto the bed, although he’s anything but a moment later, stripping John’s t-shirt over his head and mouth up John from waist to cheek and then back down to his neck. John squeezes his shoulder reassuringly, and isn’t that something, reassuring the man you’re about to feed a bit of yourself to?

“Come on, I missed you, _God,_ I needed you, come _on--”_

With a noise that might be a sob, Sherlock bites down.

It’s better than the first time even. John has to clamp his hand down over his mouth to muffle himself, and all of a sudden his hips are bucking up outside of his control into Sherlock’s hip. The noise Sherlock makes into the skin of his neck is just too perfect to be _believed,_ low and pleased and greedy all at once. His teeth clamp down tighter. He pushes John’s thighs apart. They fall open at once, and Sherlock pulls his mouth away for a moment to look down and get John’s legs wrapped around his waist.

“No,” John says breathlessly, “don’t stop, you need--”

“I know what I need,” he says, and _bites,_ just as he rolls his hips in a slow circle.

John can’t breathe. He’s nothing but points of contact: his hands on Sherlock’s shoulders, Sherlock’s hands circling round and clutching at his back, the mouth sucking at the wound in his neck, and his groin, where Sherlock’s thrusting like they’ve got five minutes til the world ends. He’s not bothering to silence himself anymore; neighbors be damned. His hands clamp down on Sherlock’s shoulders and he gasps, his face flushing hot and his head going dizzy, and comes, shaking and fully clothed.

Sherlock makes a high, whining sound and pushes his cock into the wet stain blossoming on John’s pyjama pants once, twice, a third time, then trembles, stiffens--

\--and relaxes. He licks at John’s neck once or twice again, then falls to the side.

“Mycroft,” he says, reading the question in John’s face. “Bury one of us long enough and we come back. He couldn’t tell you,” he says quickly, seeing the thunder building. “Sometimes it’s decades. He wasn’t--”

“Fuck him,” John says, and kisses Sherlock again.

Sherlock’s mouth tastes like blood and like John’s skin, which is absolutely the most perfect thing John has felt in three years.

“If you ever,” he says, because it _is_ a warning he needs to give, “fuck with me like--”

“John,” Sherlock says swiftly, “I will not lose you again.”

It’s a lie, and they both know it. But it’s the old lie, the one they’ve always had, so John takes it.

He smiles.

“Good. God knows I can’t afford Baker Street on my own.”

**Author's Note:**

> And there's the end of the main story...more or less, because I would absolutely understand if you chose not to read the next part and decide to believe they live happily ever after.
> 
> I may write filler stories as I see fit, e.g. Irene in the Tudor court, the further adventures of John and Sherlock, etc., but for now, you can consider the story complete.


End file.
